Why Most People Will Never Be Great At MARRIAGE

 

Maybe I'm just a romantic, but good luck saying love is conditional to a romantic partner. I mean, you could, I would argue in mass that would deteriorate the quality of relationships. If you remind the partner of that truth that is universal. It's like there's a certain romantic notion of unconditional love. It's part of why you have so many destructive marriages. Yes, you have to do certain things. Love is not you marrying somebody, and it is a real attitude out there in the culture. That's the Hollywood man. You know, marriages work like all values. It's work. It's something you have to reignite every day. You have to have challenges. The real disagreements. They're the things you fight about when you disagree. And it's real. If it's a value, you work it out, you struggle through it, and sometimes you struggle through, and you come to a conclusion, now this is not going to work, and you dissolve a marriage, and I'm all for dissolving after, really, really fighting for it. Because if it's an important value, and if you fell in love with this person for a reason, then that's something worth fighting for. I have a feeling that Hollywood goes the other way, but it's not this cruising along and everything is easy. No human relationship is like that. You know, they require work, and they require thinking, and they require cleaning the conditions to thrive. And that's the sense in which it's conditional. You have to work at it. And it”s not easy to do the work, and it's very easy to drift away, and I think most people don't do what it takes. And then they take the rest of their life as I'm going to cruise and yet every aspect of your life the art you choose, the friends you choose, the lovers you choose, all that require real thinking and real work to be successful at them. None of them are just there because there is no such thing as the intrinsic. And I find when I speak to audiences about relationships, I find that in general and this is cross-cultural through the different countries, different religions, and backgrounds. In general, young people do not know that the only way to make a marriage work is through a lot of pain and overcoming. They don't know that raising children involves a great deal of pain. They don't know that caring for and helping your parents approach the end of their lives, causes a great deal of pain. And everything is kind of this sketchy you know very sketchy glimpse he kind of, and I mentioned Hollywood just because it's everything's made to look easy except you know, there's kind of a funny breakdown of something but then, you know, maybe a divorce, they shoot one another so that they should get a divorce. But, the reality of how hard it is to do and how heroic it is to overcome and then actually, in the end, achieve something to create something it's almost not discussed.